A Brief Announcement

I'm up early this morning getting ready for a full day of pioneer food. We're cooking Dutch oven stuff all day, of course, with a big dinner and old-time dance this evening. What are you doing for your 24th?

But an announcement for you:
On Tuesday, July 27th I will be doing a two-hour lecture and training workshop at This Is The Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City, starting at 5:30p.m. It will be held at Smoot Hall, the first big red brick building as you enter the village. If you're interested in volunteering at the park, or if you want to learn more about Mormon pioneer foodways in a hands-on historical setting, I hope you'll come.

What Friends Are For

I have a good friend named Cody. I've known Cody for a very long time, almost twenty years. We met each other doing historical re-enactments, and since that time we've become neighbors. Cody has even employed me from time to time. Cody is, among many other things, a stone mason. Cody is also a historic preservation general contractor. In the town where we live he has restored three historic homes from the 1870s. You can see one of his recent projects here.

Cody is also an amazing wood worker. Last winter for Solstice he gave me the coolest little candle holder that he turned on a foot-treadle lathe. And today, get ready to be jealous... today he gave me...

wait for it...



Don't you think it has a very long handle? That's to keep me far away from the fire...



Of course, when there's actually bread on the peel, the fire will be swept out of the oven, but the oven will still be hot, so ergo the long handle. Actually, I don't have a bread oven. But I often dream about a wood fired bread oven. I'll probably sleep with the bread peel tonight.

That's why Cody is such a good friend: he fuels my dreams. He was in Nauvoo recently, and he went to the bakery there. He talked my book up to the sweet little ladies in the bakery, who, it turns out, wanted to know all about historic yeast applications. I'm not sure if they're allowed to get online, but we'll send them some information anyway.

Hope your plans for the 24th are coming along! Do tell...

An Agricultural Engine

Hello again, friends! Before we get started, let me just give a brief news update. Sometime this week (probably Tuesday) the blog here is going to be featured in the Mormon Times section of the DesNews. Not sure if its just the online or the actual print version. Also, at the end of the month I'm going to be making a presentation at the Utah Pioneer Heritage Arts quarterly breakfast. And sometime between now and then I'm going to be doing some foodways lectures for volunteers up at This Is The Place Heritage Park (a.k.a TITP), helping them to use pioneer foodways to hook visitors.

As I was doing some of the research for TITP recently it struck me that the core of the pioneer Utah economy was agriculturally based. Agriculture was their only significant production industry, and their only large scale export. In 1864 for example, historian Leonard Arrington documented 200,000 pounds of dried peaches being shipped from Utah to the mining communities in Montana. Similar shipments of wheat sustained the early settlement of Denver, Colorado in 1859.

So this brought me to look at all the elements of agriculture a little differently. Sometimes in the past I looked at the timber-framed barns of early Utah and thought, "If they could build such a large barn, why would they live in such small houses?" This past week I came to understand that the barn was an economic engine for the family farm. The barn sheltered the horses and oxen that plowed the fields. The barn supplied the clean sheltered space for threshing grain. Additional outbuildings stored corn, or helped to process milk, or preserve hams. Most of the output from these structures was headed to market. Often we think of self-sufficient homesteads, but the agricultural efforts were for cash crops, not simply home production.

So I was thinking about building a chicken coop for our family, and I got online to look at plans. Most of what you find online is very hobby-oriented, aimed at just a handful of hobby chickens. I have something bigger in mind, more than the occasional feel-good omlette. I'd like an economic engine. Something to house 50+ hens...

On a different topic, what are y'all doing for the 24th?

Irrigation

Before we get started, I just thought we should all give Jana the nod for her triumphal creation of Brown Bread Ice Cream in our throw-down from last time. It was a tough competition, but she prevailed in style. Yay for Jana! You can view her blog here.

So I was thinking I might not have shared my definition of "foodways" before. Actually the definition comes from my old foodie folklorist professor, Jay Anderson, a pioneer in the study of historic foodways. He says foodways is "from seed to s**t and everything in between" In other words, foodways study includes the planting of the garden, the butchering of chickens, the preparation of the meal, the eating of it, and the spreading of manure on the garden.

In that vein... yesterday was my irrigation turn. Taking turns on the irrigation ditch is an old venerated Mormon pioneer pastime. Countless feuds over the proper sharing of water hold a strong place in our Mormon traditions. Our ditch master is fond of saying, "There's two things you don't mess with in the West: a man's whiskey, and his water." I remember a talk in General Conference a couple of years ago about two Mormon farmers feuding on the ditch over the water. Eventually one killed the other. The talk was about forgiveness, I think.

This is a good water year. The reservoir is full, spilling over. There should be plenty of water for everyone. So you can imagine my surprise last week when the water seemed only half of what it should have been. We said, "Oh well," and didn't worry much. Then yesterday, again, there wasn't as much as there should have been. So I went up the ditch, gate by gate, to see where it might be going. Sure enough, someone up the ditch had their gate open and about half of my turn was going to him. Well, I corrected that. Now I'm not sure but what they might have had an arrangement to share some of the water from the person before me, but now I know I have to check the whole ditch every time.

Without water in the ditch, there will be no tomatoes in August. Till next time...

Its Ice Cream Time... again!

They say its going to be 97 degrees today. Sunday will be July 4th. You may remember that last year I posted about my ice cream making adventures on the Fourth of July. I shared a recipe for ice cream that began, "Take the yolks of 13 eggs..." So here we are a year later, and I thought, "you know, we should have an online ice cream making contest. Or fiesta. Or whatever."

So here's the showdown throwdown. Post your old fashioned ice cream recipe here, and make it on the 4th. Then lets get back together next week and share our ice cream making (and eating!) experiences.

For those who need a little help, just google "historical ice cream recipe" or even "Jefferson's ice cream". I remember seeing Thomas Jefferson's recipe last year, facsimile photo of his original handwriting. Of course the purists will use a Mormon pioneer recipe. After all, what good are Mormons without our ice cream?

Can't wait to hear what you come up with!

Its My Birthday!

Hello again. It was nice to hear all your responses to the last post. I thank you all for the feedback. It was especially nice to hear from Annette, a colleague from my days in the museum biz.

Last week I turned the big Four-Oh. Strangely, there was no crisis attached since I used up all my crises a couple of years ago with a divorce. But I did get presents. Oh boy did I get presents! A Japanese garden pagoda, gold-toe socks, and of course wonderful hours spent with my kids. All this bores you, I know.

I also got... TWO COOK BOOKS!!! The first one was the Don Holm classic treatise on Dutch oven cooking, with notes about sourdough. I made a peach cobbler for breakfast this morning (with ice cream on the side). I also got a tasty little compilation from my sister. Regular readers here might know that I absconded with my grandmother's recipe files when she retired to the assisted living home. My sister Tawna absconded with my other grandma's cooking files when alzheimer's overpowered her. Tawna is a very motivated and energetic person. She edited the collection and self-published it on Lulu.com Its called, "Recipes from the Kitchen of Metta Hale Stauffer." Yup, the daughter-in-law from Henry Alfred Stauffer of the previous posting.

Metta (she's 92 now) is a second generation Danish American. Her mother Mary Ann Amanda Peterson came to Utah as a little girl, and they were both raised in Cache Valley and also a stint in Blackfoot, ID. In the recipe book we find a few recipes reaching back to Metta Hansen Peterson, my great-great-grandmother. One such is this unremarkable recipe for "Meat Dumplings."

1/2 lb ground meat
2 eggs
Small onion, chopped
1/2 c breat crumbs
Salt, pepper
If it needs moisture add sego milk. WOrk into small balls. Roll in flour and drop in soup.

Basically, this is Frickadeller. This Danish version of a hamburger, meatloaf or dumpling can take several forms, and might be served on a bun, stand alone, or in soup. In the course of my research I came across a very similar recipe attributed to Caroline Berg Ostermann, circa 1850. Caroline studied cuisine in Denmark before immigrating to Utah in 1868. Her frickadeller recipe came down through five generations, and is now archived in the Utah State Historical Society archives at the Rio Grande station in Salt Lake City.

Aren't I a lucky boy to receive such birthday presents?

Mush

So over Memorial Day I went to pay homage to ancestors at various cemetaries. One stop was to the grave of Ulrich Stauffer, my great great grandfather. He was a polygamist, and his wives are all buried around his grave. I'm descended from his wife Verena, through his son Henry Alfred.

Ulrich liked to eat a particular kind of cracked wheat cereal. I believe it has to do with his Swiss heritage. In our family, we like to tell a story that he actually invented this mush, but that's not really likely. Still, we call it Stauffer Mush, and we eat it particularly at family reunions, to affirm our heritage. The traditional preparation is that it should be made rather stiff, enough that it can "stand alone" on a plate, and it is served with sugar and half-n-half. It's not bad.

While I was at the cemetary I bumped into a second cousin that I didn't know from Adam. But he was there poking around Ulrich's grave, so I figured we were related. He's also through Henry Alfred's line, but through my Grandpa's brother, whom we had always heard called "Uncle Ree." Turns out the man's name was Henry. So I asked him if his family ever had Stauffer Mush. He replied that he remembered Henry used to make it and it was delicious, but when his mother made the same mush it was terrible. We tried to figure out why and decided maybe she didn't put salt in it while it boiled. Also, he says his mother was always stingy on the sugar, and only used skim milk. Thus died the Stauffer Mush tradition in his family.

Hope you all had a lovely Memorial Day.